When I featured Hanzomon , one of the gates of Edo castle (present-day the Royal Palace), I wrote “the road from this gate to the west is exceptionally straight”, to let Shogun escape from Edo castle in case of emergency. Koshu Kaido is exactly this road.
As I wrote before, it is hard to reach Edo castle from outside , because Edo city was so elaborately designed that almost all roads were absorbed into a whirl or a pattern of a snail shell when they came near Edo castle. But Koshu Kaido was the only exception. Koshu is the old name of present-day Yamanashi Prefecture (and Kaido means “road”), where most loyal samurai warriors to Tokugawa Shogunate were placed. Taking this into consideration, the starting point of Koshu Kaido looks like the end of a runway.
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